Hacker Musings and OCD

To save Twitter, we must destroy it.

So many people had an experience like this. Twitter was fun, fast, easy to use; and brevity is the soul of wit. If you were a programmer, you’d often learn a new platform or language by writing a simple Twitter client; and tons of really smart people were writing interesting software that took advantage of all the new toys in our toy box, with Twitter as the base.

Fun times.

It got even better, for a while. Twitter replaced RSS, for many; a scan of your feed let you know where your friends were, what important software updates were released, and everything else you could want.

Yeah, there was the Fail Whale and porno bots but it wasn’t any worse than we’d seen already. And we had the Arab Spring! People got work by telling jokes on Twitter. We had Weird Twitter and Scottish Twitter and …

But then came GamerGate, followed shortly by their brothers in arms the Alt-Right, and Russian trolls, and now the dullard in the Oval Office.

The solution is already there. RSS is still good, and usable. You can support independent media, like many good podcasts, instead of supporting a company that thinks that giving more characters for racist bile is the solution.

Everyone bitches and moans about walled gardens and “closed platforms” and “you are not the customer, you’re the product”. So take the air out of their sails. Stop “microblogging” and write real thoughts. Read long-form journalism. The internet has given us the tools. Use them.